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May 7th:How do Service Workers Work?

Only recently did designer Frances Berriman and Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell coin the term “progressive web apps.” In 2015 the pair introduced PWAs as a way to describe how apps will leverage new features supported by modern browsers, including service workers and web app manifests, which allow users to still use their native operating system (OS), but upgrade their web apps to progressive web applications.

In order to provide rich experiences and high performance, native mobile apps must sacrifice storage space, real-time updates and search engine visibility. Traditional web apps endure lack of native compile executable and dependence on unreliable web connectivity. Service workers attempt to give PWAs the best of both.

“If you heard of PWAs, you also heard of service workers, but what are they, how do they work, and what does it have to with anything?””

What We’re Reading Around the Web

Service Workers and SEO(5 min. read)Search Engine Land “”Did you know that browsers have had superpowers since about 1996? They have! When he was developing JavaScript for Netscape, Brendan Eich ‘invented the javascript: URL along with JavaScript in 1995, and intended that javascript: URLs could be used as any other kind of URL, including being bookmark-able.’ That means you could write a script into a link (e.g. Bookmark Me!), bookmark that script (put a little button on the browser’s bookmark bar, for instance), and run that code on any page you’re browsing. Check out this subreddit for some fun examples.”

Take UX to the Next Level for PWAs(5 min. read)Medium“There were stand-alone web products and there were apps, but now there’s also the hybrid breed of progressive web apps (PWA) that’s getting more popular for their ability to deliver app-like experience but in the browser. Their platform independence is attractive for developers since it means less time and costs involved. They are also alluring to users since they don’t need to be downloaded, aren’t intensive on hardware resources, and can even be used offline while still offering sufficient functionality.”

Should Your Business Get a PWA?(3 min. read)TechHQ“Thanks to help from ‘service workers’, PWAs work even if users are offline or on low-quality networks. A service worker is a snippet of code, a script that runs in the background and helps a PWA function. It’s one of its critical building blocks. Service workers help PWAs do things like send notifications to users and stay up-to-date.Service workers help provide an engaging experience while offline and ensure that your application loads quickly.”

Chrome 75 Beta Displays Service Workers (2 min. read)9to5Google“Service workers are increasingly leveraged by today’s websites to create powerful experiences. This includes push notifications and background syncing, as well as offline apps. Given that they run in the background, and have no corresponding web page or user interaction, Chrome 75 will now displayservice workers in the Task Manager (Settings > More Tools).”

April 23rd:Do You Control Your Browser?

Stanley Kubrick predicted first contact in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey and introduced a now-iconic, silver-tongued psychopathic A.I. by the name of “HAL” (1 character below “IBM”—get it?), but all we got in our own 2001 was United States v. Microsoft Corp. Some liked it and some didn’t but what everyone agreed on was that our freedom to choose our own browser would be integral to the Web’s success.

This week we’re focusing on how two technologies—browser extensions and bookmarklets—can expand our ability to make use of the web by customizing our browsers. Distinguished IR engineer Pat Needham documents his recent adventures in building a Chrome extension, warts and all. We’ve all been there, Pat (spoiler alert: it’s published!).

Are you an extension evangelist? How have extensions and bookmarklets changed the way you experience the web? Tell us what you think @GetInRhythm or on the InRhythmU blog.

“Curious about the process behind developing your own Chrome extension? InRhythm breaks down the steps from ideation to publishing as an individual engineer.”

What We’re Reading Around the Web

Bookmarkhuh?How-to Geek“”Did you know that browsers have had superpowers since about 1996? They have! When he was developing JavaScript for Netscape, Brendan Eich ‘invented the javascript: URL along with JavaScript in 1995, and intended that javascript: URLs could be used as any other kind of URL, including being bookmark-able.’ That means you could write a script into a link (e.g. Bookmark Me!), bookmark that script (put a little button on the browser’s bookmark bar, for instance), and run that code on any page you’re browsing. Check out this subreddit for some fun examples.”

Mobile AR Experiences in Unity(7 min. read)Thoughtbot“Browser extensions are like apps for your browser. Unlike bookmarklets, these are vendor-specific toolkits for extending browser functionality. Those ad blockers you keep hearing about are typically browser extensions; LastPass, a popular (and recommended) password manager is another. For-profit companies like ActiveInbox depend on browser extensions. At InRhythm we’re thinking hard about how to help our clients using these powerful tools. Thoughtbot offers a great write-up on how to dive in and start creating—Chrome and Mozilla offer detailed guidance as well.”

R.I.P Bookmarklets (9 min. read)Medium﻿“Brian Donohue, former CEO of Instapaper (a company that bookmarklets essentially made possible) laments that ‘Bookmarklets are Dead (we just don’t know it yet)‘. Written in 2014, this important article was mainly reacting to security-focused technical changes that would cripple the power of bookmarklets in certain scenarios. While the reports of this demise were somewhat exaggerated, it’s true that these powerful customizations remain beholden to the goodwill of browser vendors, and there’s a risk in that. Run out and make some bookmarklets while you still can!”

Are Extensions Safe?(5 min. read)Brian Madden“Browser extensions are deeply integrated into the browser experience, which means they can ‘see’ pretty much anything you do on the Web, and have access to a lot of your data. This is their power, and when used well they function as useful apps. Extensions, just like apps, must ask for certain permissions prior to installation, and that’s good. But the vetting process for extensions is not as robust as it is for, say, Apple’s App Store. Bad actors are always searching for weaknesses, and browser extensions are not immune. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater—you can be a good actor, and build powerful tools for your customers and friends that only bring value.””

April 12th:VR-room

At InRhythm we’re constantly experimenting with new technologies, both within our internal teams and with our clients on the cutting-edge projects they’re working on. Virtual Reality (or VR) is one trend that we’ve been following very closely; while overly optimistic predictions abound, the promise of the technology is real. One of the reasons for VR’s recent, explosive success is the wealth of open, free software and tools to assist engineers in experimenting with their ideas. Our engineering teams are certainly paying attention.

In this issue, our Web Practice Lead Sandro Pasquali starts us off with a brief history of VR, from the good old days of stereoscopics to the modern fully-immersive experiences you only need a fancy pair of goggles to enjoy.

Already living in the virtual world? Is the idea of a new virtual paradigm giving you motion sickness? Tell us what you think @GetInRhythm or here on the InRhythmU blog.

“As virtual reality (or VR) continues its recent, explosive growth, we go over the history (and hiccups) that took us from Stereoscopics to Oculus.”

What We’re Reading Around the Web

Reframing VRA-Frame“Way back in the days of Friends and Geocities, VR arrived on the web…sort of. It is definitely true that VRML was enabling browser-based 3D experiences, but slow networks and underpowered machines conspired against the success of these pioneering efforts. Good news: browser-based VR is back with A-Frame. This impressive framework is surprisingly powerful and easy to use—it’s just HTML and JavaScript. Maybe it’s time to bring back boo.com?”

Mobile AR Experiences in Unity(30 min. read)The Programming Historian“The idea of building something VR-related often intimidates developers. It seems like rebuilding reality should be really hard, right? Sometimes it is, but you’d be surprised how just a little bit of work can lead to real mobile VR (or AR) applications. One of the dominant platforms for building such applications is the Unity 3D Development platform. In this comprehensive article, Jacob W. Greene provides a detailed walkthrough of how to build AR experiences for mobile. Want to do full VR? Here’s another intro that will get you started with the Unity engine.”

React Native 360Facebook“Many of InRhythm’s clients use React for building user interfaces; some even use React Native to build mobile applications. It turns out that React Native can also be used to deploy VR experiences. The fine folks at Facebook (who, if you’ll recall, bought Oculus) have done some work in this area, and they’ve released React 360. Head over to their Github repository and give it a whirl—there are plenty of examples to get you started.”

VR is not AR is not MR(9 min. read)Nvidia“As the VR ‘movement’ gained steam over the last several years, competing visions of just how the virtual world plays with reality began to appear. When you think of ‘VR’ do you think of putting on a headset and moonwalking with Einstein? I do! But Augmented Reality (AR) is not that, and Mixed Reality (MR) isn’t either. Confused? Nvidia has a guide for you. If you’re looking for even more detail, this useful guide adds more information on the kinds of consumer products tied to each of the VR ‘types.'”

Among the many communities and tools comprising the vast Java ecosystem, competition is intense. In this issue of our cloud engineering newsletter, the news you need: JDK 12 brings new GC, lazy initialization in Spring Boot, and the next generation Quarkus framework is here.

Quarkus is a Kubernetes Native Java framework tailored for GraalVM and HotSpot, crafted from best-of-breed Java libraries and standards. The goal of Quarkus is to make Java a leading platform in Kubernetes and serverless environments, while offering developers a unified reactive and imperative programming model to optimally address a wider range of distributed application architectures.

Spring Boot 2.2 M1 shows clear direction for spring, offering significantly faster binding of large numbers of configuration properties, faster startup, and lower memory footprint when using the Actuator and Opt-in support for lazy bean initialization.

Our latest Cloud Engineering Digest covers some big topics—the latest news in cloud, key framework updates, and some additional reading on software architecture trends. Check out the links you need to see now below:

Spring Boot 2.1.3 Available Now
This release includes over 70 fixes, improvements and dependency upgrades. If you’re still using Spring Boot 2.0.x, an upgrade to Spring Boot 2.1.x is strongly encouraged by the Spring team.

jUnit 5.4.0 was recently released and can now be used for migration from jUnit 4. The main defect with incompatible JUnit 4 format test reports has been fixed by a new junit-platform-reporting artifact containing a LegacyXmlReportGeneratingListener that generates XML reports using a backward compatible format.

More and more details about new features in the upcoming JDK12: New static method teeing will be added to java.util.stream.Collectors interface which allows collection using two independent collectors, which then merge their results using the supplied function.

Amazon released Corretto 8, Amazon’s version of OpenJDK. They had already Corretto 11.

PCF 2.4: Enhanced Security with TLS-Encrypted traffic, CredHub can use the same external database as other PAS components, Loggregator v2 API, with support for Global CPI Extensions (a feature which unlocks native IaaS features while retaining the inherent portability of PCF), Zero Downtime App Deployments (Beta), and much more.

Micronaut 1.1 M2 released, with support for gRPC, AWS API Gateway and AWS Alexa Lambda, and an even faster cold start time and performance optimizations, etc.

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